Socialist Unity Party of Germany

The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) was a Leninist political party in East Germany which existed from 21 April 1946 to 16 December 1989. The SED was led by Walter Ulbricht from 1950 to 1971, and its communist views led to it being backed by the Soviet Union, which stationed millions of troops in the country at the end of World War II and put down riots in 1953. The party's second leader, Erich Honecker, was a non-revisionist Marxist, and he refused to follow Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the USSR, leading to the isolation of East Germany in the collapsing Eastern Bloc. In 1989, people from both sides of Berlin tore down the Berlin Wall to reunite Germany as the SED's rule collapsed, and the party's remnants merged with the Die Linke party.